How to learn Java Webservices

Question

Please suggest some good resources to start writing Java Web services.

Answer 1

If you're using the Spring Framework, I suggest Spring-WS.

There is a very helpful reference guide which should get you started.

Answer 2

This is a good starting point for REST and JAX-RS:

http://www.lunatech-research.com/archives/2008/03/20/restful-web-sevices-resteasy-jax-rs

Answer 3

A great place to start is Sang Shin's online course. There's an active online group as well as good slides, examples and exercises to complete. The great thing about this course is that there are timelines set for each component of the course, to help you figure out how much time to spend on a particular concept.

Answer 4

Apache Axis (http://ws.apache.org/axis) is easy to use and highly effective for basic web services in my experience.

The user guide should get you started: http://ws.apache.org/axis/java/user-guide.html

Answer 5

The standard way in Java to write a web service is to use Apache Axis.

If you are generating a web service client, then you need the WSDL (.xsd, .wsdl, etc) of the foreign web service, and then you can use wsdl2java (or preferably, the ANT task provided by axis-ant) to simply generate the code to do the communications and a model.

If you are generating a web service on the server side, then you can use Java2WSDL to turn a Java model into a web service implementation, although you will have to code the server side within the Impl class it generates. You can then easily deploy on Tomcat, etc, using the axis.war and the generated deploy.wsdd script.

There's plenty of documentation out there that will help.

Answer 6

I highly recommend you to start by the new specification Jax-WS 2.0. It's a good idea walk on the standards. Sun provides a reference implementation that you can use. Try the JAX-WS web site and then you can watch the Metro web site to see all the standard ws-* stack.

I'm using this tool to consume and provide services. It's fast, easy to use, customizable and the standard.

Enjoy it!

Answer 7

Check out Java Enterprise in a nutshell it has a good section on web services, describing both the J2EE framework specification and also the Apache Axis implementation. Bear in mind that, while it may be popular, Axis is not the standard method, but something that was developed while standards where being finalised/refined.